The diversity and variety of the documentary
(The history of documentary cinema:
a quick survey)
Dr. Linda C.H. LAI
SM4134
Part I
Precursors?
Documentary/ethnographic impulse in Early Cinema
Actualities in early cinema (pre 1905-6)
Travel films (Travelogues)
http://www.youtube.com/user/travelfilmarchive
http://www.travelfilmarchive.com
Edward Curtis’s In the Land of the Headhunters (1914)
…films whose subjects were non-Western, non-urban, and in pre-modern
societies
Reference: http://www.africanfilmny.org/network/news/T01m1reddy.html
“The Emergence of Ethnographic Film Practice: Past Travels and Future Itineraries” by Prerana
Reddy
Early cinema and the ethnographic impulse
Selected works from Animalomania
(title originally the name of a book with illustrations by JJ. Grandville published
in 1836)
Nanook of the North
(1922)
Robert Flaherty
Robert Flaherty…(1920s…)
Documentation + Documentary
Re-staging everyday life episodes + use of film narration
Re-staging the only way to share knowledge
Film as a recording/documenting tool:
Camera position, mise-en-scene, duration of shots, types of shots
Film as a medium of representation of findings:
Organization – the need of a “story”; from summer to winter; long takes; strong sense of
continuity
Further reference:
“How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert Flaherty (1922) at
http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/23_rf1_2.htm
Jean Rouch’s works in Africa
Berlin, a symphony of a big city
(Germany 1927)
Walter Ruttmann
...an ordinary day in 1927
Organization – narrative – journey
Collecting – categorization – typification
Representation
Song of Ceylon
(1934)
Basil Wright
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Production:
GPO Film Unit for Ceylon Tea Marketing Board
…begun as an Empire Marketing Board film
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Background of production:
Producer: John Grierson
Screenplay: John Grierson, Basil Wright …,
based partly on a book about Ceylon written by traveler
Robert Knox in 1680
Music: Walter Leigh
Cast: Lionel Wendt (Narrator)
……
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Basil Wright was sent to Ceylon to film four one-reel travelogues as
publicity for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board.
When he was actually there, he was driven by his own “inner impulse”
which made him shoot other sites and themes. The idea of Song of
Ceylon was not in his mind when he was there until after he returned
to London to edit the footage.
• There was no shooting script, but a screenplay afterwards, also with
reference to an existing book.
• The editing and sound in the film were done in England. Eight tracks
of recorded sound and music and images were combined.
• The film’s narration was taken from Robert Knox’s book (1680),
which Wright discovered by chance in a store window.
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
I. the Buddha
• Pilgrims up a mountainside to pray…
II. the Virgin Island (10:54)
• Daily life of the people…
III. the Voices of Commerce (~23:00)
• Two systems of labors juxtaposed: sound track of British stock
market prices and the arrival and departure times for ships // natives
of Ceylon gathering coconuts ad tea leaves by hand
IV. the Apparel of the Gods (29:43)
• Religious and cultural life of Ceylon as lived before the arrival of the
British colonizers
The four titles were inserted afterwards.
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
• The film is often called the world’s finest example of
“lyrical documentary.”
• Grierson described the theme of the work,
“Buddhism and the art of life it has to offer, set upon by a Western
metropolitan civilization which, in spite of all our skills, has no art of
life to offer.”
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Keywords…
Interpretation /
narrative composition /
sight and sound craftsmanship /
experimentation of sound /
anthropology and power structure
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Bibliography:
http://www.filmreference.com/Film-So-St/Song-of-Ceylon.html
Screen online:
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/442428/index.html
Cecil Starr
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Comparison:
Laleen Jayamanne
A Song of Ceylon (1985, 51 minutes, color)
CASE STUDY:
Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon
A Song of Ceylon (Laleen Jayamanne, 1985, Australia, 51 minutes)
Her work is NOT an ethnographic film, but it engages in issues of
ethnography and anthropology in general, critically.
CASE STUDY:
Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon
Jayamanne is a Srilankan working overseas.
• The work focuses on gender and the body.
• Trinh T. Minh-ha remarks on the work,
“The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and
a theatrical ritual… The film engages the viewer in the cinematic
body as spectacles…”
(in journal Discourse)
CASE STUDY:
Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon
Jayamanne’s own Song is based on an anthropological text that
deals with the experience of “possession” – “of a body being
possessed by other bodies, of the voice being multiplied.”
•
•
•
•
Ethnography of class
Cultural hybridization
Found anthropological text
Daily rituals
Bibliography:
“Anna Rodrigo Interviews Laleen Jayamanne on A Song of Ceylon”
in Toward Cinema and Its Double: cross-cultural. (pp. 65-66)
Song of Ceylon and more...
Producers:
Empire Marketing Board (EMB)
a model applied to many British colonies
(Commercial sponsor of film:)
The Ceylon Tea Board
South Africa in first half of 20th C...
African Film Productions Ltd. (AFP)
1st South African-based film production company
AFP documentaries were sponsored by government
departments
(Propaganda, tourism, educational...)
The social-political side of documentary film:
Documentary cinema is not just filmmaking.
Historically speaking, it has been the location of power
control and government public relations.
Today...
Democratic possibilities of audience input?
Notion of archive?
• Night Mail
• (1936)
• John Grierson (producer)
Night Mail
Documentation + Documentary
John Grierson (Britain, 1930s…)
Grierson founded the GPO’s Film Unit in 1933…
Night Mail (released 1936, dir. Harry Watt, Basil Wright)
= “camera truth” “sound archive”
On the British postal system
Ethnography of technology…ethnography of urban sound
Screen on-line:
http://www.screenonline.org.hk/film/id/530415/index.html
Maya Deren
Maya Deren
Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti
(put together posthumously in 1977)
(her own documentation in writing published 1953)
Visual anthropology: the case of Maya Deren
(Avant-garde filmmaker/experimentation in visual
anthropology)
•
Apparatus: exploring the material possibilities of the
camera
•
Reflexivity
•
Ritual: union of cultural FORM and CONTENT
 Moral commitment to aesthetic sensibility
Visual anthropology: the case of Maya Deren
Filmmaker’s artistic sensibility
“The problem of the filmmaker then becomes not how to
make a thing look like itself, so much as how to make it
look like what he wants the audience to feel about it. He
must discover how to translate his emotion about
something into a visual film expression.”
[Legend of Maya Deren, 1942-47, p. 300]
content-as-form + filmmaker’s personal artistic
sensibility +
commitment to the morality of form
The activity of documentation involves all of the
following three:
Apparatus
Reflexivity
Ritual
Ethnographic filmmaking (Paul Henley, 46)
Surrealist documentary
Land without Bread
Luis Buñuel
Direct cinema
Titicut Follies
Frederick Wiseman:
Release Date:
– 1967 (USA)
• Titicut Follies is a black and white 1967 documentary film by Frederick
Wiseman about the treatment of patient at Massachusetts Correctional
Institution in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The title is taken from a talent
show put on by the hospital's inmates.
• The film’s release was banned (outside the field of education) in the United
States from 1972-1992 by the Massachusetts Surpreme Judicial Court
because it violated the patients’ rights.
• In 1992, it was allowed to be shown on PBS. The Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts has ordered that "A brief explanation shall be included in the
film that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts
Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966.”
Cinema verite
Chronicle of a summer
Chronique d'un ete (Paris 1961).
Jean Rouch…(1940s…)
use of documentary editorial devices + making “documentary fictions”
Play with boundaries of fact Vs fiction, observer Vs the observed…, and
tradition Vs modernity
Chris Marker
Sans Soleil
Summary
Documentary style
Forgotten Silver
Summary
Creative treatment
Aesthetic concern
…always part of documentary filmmaking
Persuasion is a result of the effort to organize information.
(Persuasion is a necessary consequence of the maker’s
own interpretation of the material.)
Levels of reality and truthfulness…
Verifiable facts – factual accuracy (the 6 Ws)
Atmosphere, emotional intensity
Attitude
Paradigms (event + context) (cultural phenomena…)
Objective truth to Multiple truths
• Actuality
• Factual truth
• Truth of the sense
• Truth of abstraction
• Truth of thoughts and attitudes
• Truth of character
Documentary impulse and documentary
practices pre-exist documentary cinema or
the documentary genre.